Large manufacturers today face extreme margin pressures from low-cost producers, rising energy costs, and regulatory and environmental restrictions. The need to improve asset performance is very great. One barrier to improvement has been the absence of a performance management solution encompassing the various divisions of operations, maintenance, and finance, for example. With each division using its own performance metrics, it is difficult for optimal decisions to be made, such as balancing reliability goals against asset utilization goals.
Many people have been chasing the “holy grail” of self-diagnostics. Furthermore, there are many balanced scorecards and key performance indicator solutions being offered in today's market. Many seem to be making similar claims including that their product will make a manufacturing process run better, faster, more efficiently, and with greater returns. However, one of the greatest challenges for effectively improving plant asset performance is that the necessary information is scattered across disconnected silos of data in each department. Furthermore, it is difficult to integrate these silos due to several fundamental differences. For example, control system data is real-time data measured in terms of seconds, whereas maintenance cycle data is generally measured in terms of calendar based maintenance (e.g., days, weeks, months, quarters, semi-annual, annual), and financial cycle data is measured in terms of fiscal periods. Furthermore, different vendors of various equipment and enterprise systems tend to have their own set of codes (e.g., status codes) and are non compliant with any universal standard.
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with the standard. The term “open” is sometimes restricted to royalty-free technologies while the term “standard” is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by interested parties and which operate on a consensus basis. As used herein, the term “open” refers to a standard that is publicly available and that may be used across vendors and customers.
MIMOSA (Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance) is an operations and maintenance information open systems alliance organized as a non-profit trade association which includes vendors, integrators and service providers, and end users. MIMOSA collaboratively develops and promotes open standards for operations and maintenance for fleets, plants, and facilities. MIMOSA produces vendor-neutral open information exchange standards. The MIMOSA open standard provides a common language for vendors to use. However, the MIMOSA standard assumes that every external vendor system is speaking the MIMOSA language, which is not the case today and is not likely to become the case any time soon.
Manufacturers are drowning in a flood of real-time and non-real time data and are losing revenues at the same time. Therefore, there is a growing call for a manufacturing intelligence solution that contextualizes the disparate data in a balanced manner.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems and methods with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.